I’m not sure I have read your exploration of the causes behind the premox tragedy, but I certainly believe that changes in the vineyards and winemaking led to more vulnerable wines, variability in corks led to the “random” nature of the expression of premox among different bottles in the same case, and DIAM or screw tops are simply masking the underlying vulnerabilities…at least for a good long while, it seems.
Can you elaborate on what changes occurred almost universally in the 1995-96 vintages and EVER SINCE to make the wines more vulnerable? For example, did everyone but Coche and Raveneau buy a pneumatic press all at once? Did everyone else cut down their sulfur usage all at once? Did the corks all go to hell at at once? Why wouldn’t Leflaive realize that they too were relatively spared until they changed things in the early 2000’s? And why to this day, 25 years later, are producers still making wines that will premox and simply mask them with DIAM (or refuse to), rather than return to wine growing and winemaking as they and their fathers/grandfathers did in the pre-premox era? (And I would love to know where you wrote about premox previously.)
I do have one of these wine accessories–not sure if it came with a LeverPull or when I got it, but I do love it for soft wax: http://www.everythingbutwine.com/Wax-Whacker
Works perfectly on SQN and other less brittle wax, and it is nearly impossible to nick/cut yourself with out. Just sharp enough and just blunt enough…
You pose some very pertinent questions. But, if the wine wasn’t already oxidized when it went into the bottle (which may have sometimes been the case in the past), I think that the closure is a necessary and sufficient factor for premox in white Burgundy, though there are often contributing factors. But even if you do everything right, if you get a bad closure your wine can still oxidize. The way cork oaks were cultivated changed a lot around the same time: the trees grow faster and are harvested more often. Even if they were few and far between, producers who truly didn’t change a thing still saw an increase in problems. In post #71, I cited the example of a producer who tested the oxygen transmission rate of a batch of high quality corks and found a variability to the tune of a factor of 50. Now, for a given level of free SO2, with that batch of corks you will have wines that are oxidized, wines that are perfect, and wines that are reduced in the same lot. It is hard to believe if you are not involved in production, perhaps, and I was for a long time convinced that it was just a question of folks having “messed up the winemaking”; but if you want to understand why people like Olivier Lamy have been convinced to go to DIAM, this is why: they have done everything they can to make the wines the right way, from the vineyards to pressing to élevage to bottling without any appreciable dissolved oxygen; and they have still suffered from premox or just unacceptable levels of bottle variation when you know the wine in question intimately.
Of course, and as I also discussed in post #71, the winemaking changes that were widely adopted in the mid-1990s that made wines more fragile also resulted in stylistic changes: less dry extract, less physical structure in the wine; wines that were more “elegant” by one definition, but it was harder to find “Meursault you could chew”, as a friend of mine likes to put it. I think the test of time has also shown that these new school wines also do fewer interesting things with time even when they don’t oxidize. My recent vertical with Vincent Dureuil was illuminating in this regard, as in 1998, when he first bought a pneumatic press, he told me that the salesman reassured him that he’d programmed it with the same press program as a famous Côte de Beaune domaine. The marc at the end of the press cycle was still moist, and his father told him it wasn’t done and to press it again. He refused, thinking he knew better… and today, the 1998 is the most evolved, least textural, and least interesting wine in a vertical of his Meix Cadot Vieilles Vignes. Happily, he quickly understood that if you use a pneumatic press correctly, you can get very good results (FYI, Raveneau has used a peneumatic press for years, and Coche uses one as well, though they still have the old Vaslin screw press; Domaine d’Auvenay and Leroy use a pneumatic press; PYCM uses a pneumatic press). But a lot of people were regrettably slow learners in this respect—and in fairness, many didn’t have the habit of drinking their own wines with age, and nor did consumers stop buying them, so where was the incentive to learn?
However, I’m convinced that without the problem with closures, these changes would have resulted in an (arguably regrettable) stylistic change but not in premox.
If we are really going to go into the many contributing factors to premox beyond the closure, my list would include:
clonal selections with a higher cluster weight, meaning fatter berries with more juice vs skins
climate change resulting in grapes with higher levels of polyphenoloxidases
viticultural practices unadapted to warmer vintages: hedging low, cultivating the soil late in the season, resulting in higher pH musts
pressing too gently, without extracting from the skins
too little lees
oxidative élevage practices, including: too much small volume new oak, incorrectly executed battonage, heating cellars to accelerate malolactic fermentation, not enough topping
insufficient SO2
dissolved oxygen at bottling due to unsparged bottling lines, tanks, and pumps
However, you can get all of this right, and a lot else too, and still be let down by the closure!
This isn’t much of an issue for me; I have very few wines that use wax in my cellar.
But I am increasingly becoming a minimalist when it comes to any sort of processing or packaging. Everything “extra” you do to a product takes energy and adds expense; if you are burning fossil fuels to do it, incrementally you are adding to your carbon footprint. Unless there is a demonstrated benefit to the product, that is 100% waste we can all do without.
Give me lighter bottles, no foil, no wax, and better pricing. As for whether wax (or foil) have a benefit, I’ve yet to be convinced but have an open mind.
While slightly off-topic (though I assume the implication is that wax is unrelated to oxidation), I have to give extra thanks to William for his multiple posts about premature oxidation. Especially the last one (post 103)! This is the clearest, most complete, and fact-based explanation for what changes happened in the 90s that (in high likelihood) led to the rash of premox that still plagues us. Perhaps this was just copied and pasted from another article of yours William, but I haven’t seen this before. If you have more detail than these several posts, please share a link.
I have touched on the subject at reasonable length in print when discussing particular producers. For example, in my feature on Leflaive’s Chevalier-Montrachet, I discussed the particular issues at that address (moving the wine from one cellar to another across the village in barrels during the summer; attempting to harvest according to the biodynamic calendar [notably in 2006]; low sulfur; and then, as ever, variable corks). More recently, I described the pressing practices chez Dureuil-Janthial that I outlined above. I have contemplated writing a full feature-length piece, a I do think the phenomenon is at this stage largely understood; and even if it is complex and multifactorial, handwringing to the effect that it’s a mystery is mostly disingenuous. But a number of producers I hoped to quote on the subject declined to participate on the record, which put me off, and I have not lack of other subjects to keep me occupied!
It does interest me personally, though, since I make white wine in California and will soon make a bit in Burgundy. While I like the aging dynamics of wines under high quality natural cork, and also suspect that there are other things in cork (tannins, lactones etc) that can represent a positive endogenous contribution to the wine’s profile over time (i.e., a cork is more than just a closure), I am also acutely aware of all the myriad faults and flaws that can derive from cork, too, as well as flagrant variations in OTR within a batch of corks. It’s not an easy decision to make.
Thanks William, I’ll look for those articles to dive in further. As for producers declining to go on the record, I’m not surprised. There is a liability problem that I’m sure they are worried about exposing themselves to. This is one of the saddest elements of the premox problem - that we buyers have nearly zero recourse to get failed wine replaced in these particular circumstances. It’s very hard to accept 10% failure rate (or indeed much higher) on a product that is priced at such a premium.
Hmm, this is intriguing. I haven’t heard the suggestion before that natural cork in fact gives positive contribution to the flavors in aged wine. Of course it makes sense, but I’d love to see some more data about this idea.
In fact, it was the opposite: two producers who have very few problems didn’t want to talk about where their neighbors might have gone wrong! Which I understand.
I think one of the unfortunate cork reps who contributed to a cork vs screw cap debate a few years back brought this up, and was promptly defenestrated as an industry shill! But there is quite a lot of literature on it, and not all of it funded by the cork industry, e.g. Aromatic Potential and Bioactivity of Cork Stoppers and Cork By-Products - PMC Given that wine can be in contact with cork for a long time, this is not without interest. Spend some time smelling the corks next time you open a few bottles!
The first batch of Amorim certified TCA corks we used for our Chenin in 2017 actually imparted quite a lot of vanillin, to the extent that, amusingly, our Norwegian importer suggested we use less new oak (all our barrels were >3 years old at that stage). Admittedly, this is a cross one has to bear when making wine in California, as everyone assumes you must use too much new oak. We went over to DIAM, because of consistency but also because the quality of corks I wanted to buy represented about 10% of the wholesale price per bottle, which got me in trouble with my business partner.
In Burgundy, we use very good quality corks from Francisco Sagrera for our red wines, and I think we will do the same for white. But I’m honestly tempted by DIAM 30, just on the grounds of consistency. I certainly admire people who see this as a totally black-and-white issue, because I find the choice far from self-evident.
I wonder about some of the easier to deal with (for consumers) wax that doesn’t seem to be well fused to the glass, since you can just pull it off from the bottom up. It’s fused to the cork, due to the porous nature. If it’s not solidly fused all the way around to the glass, and just to the cork, you could have a circular pocket around the inside of the neck. Most oxygen ingress is between the cork and the neck and the cork, not through the cork. So, some wax may be doing nothing or having a certain percentage of bottles under it doing nothing. Of course I’ve seen plenty of waxes that seem to always have a great seal, but a few types are suspect.
Anyway, since wax is the topic here, and DIAM is shown to be highly reliable, is wax really ever a superior option to DIAM (and similar products)?
Regarding the use of wax capsules, i have an interesting anecdote from the time when i had a part time/weekend job at a wine importer during the time i was studying at the university.
We were selling the wines by Francois Raveneau, and they always filled the wines so much as to only leaving a tiny bubble of air trapped beneath the cork. As many of you probably also know, they are using oldschool and quite brittle wax capsules. The result was, that you could often see if the wines had been exposed to excessive heat during either transportation or storage, as this resulted in the cracking of the capsule when the corked was raised as the volume of wine expanded.
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